A Classic at the end of the Road

By Anthony Troon
Reproduced from the SWMS newsletter, Winter 1994, with permission

If you drive to Campbeltown, it
always takes longer than you
expect. This is an immutable fact
of life, like DNA or the tide tables. But
if you're hunting down whisky, the
tortuously beautiful route down to the
end of the Kintyre peninsula is worth
every twist and turn.

While each malt distillery is
different, surely none is more different
than Springbank. A tourist magazine
would probably gush that the past has
stood still here: but it hasn't. It's just
that the experience of the past has not
been discarded, while any so-called
advances of the present and future are
never adopted for simple reasons of
economy and efficiency. The whisky
comes first.

And the result is a whisky - and a
distillery - unique for several reasons.
For Springbank does not make whisky
the easy way (in fact it makes two of
only three surviving Campbeltown
malts, Springbank and Longrow: the
third, a rarity, is Glen Scotia). Once
there were nearly 30 Campbeltowns, a
reason why this particular style of
whisky still has its own separate
classification. But it is no coincidence
that the Springbank is still revered as a
great classic.

So let's ask how they do it. First you
find that the distillery, approached
down a battered lane between a depot
selling concrete slabs and an evangelical
church, is not a beauty designed for
sightseer-orgasm It's a working place
where whisky has been distilled (legally)
since 1828 and (illegally) from much
earlier. Travelling abroad, to Italy or the
Greek islands, you might appreciate best
the places which haven't transformed
themselves into fanciful tourist venues.
Campbeltown itself, and the Springbank
Distillery, have this quality of integrity.

So to the whisky-making. Springbank
is the only remaining Scotch malt
distillery which conducts the entire
process itself on a single site. It starts
with barley, and it ends up with bottled
whisky. Unusually, it germinates all of
the barley it uses in floor malting and
dries it in its own kiln. The huge
majority of malt distillers now buy their
raw material ready-prepared from
industrial malting. But Springbank's is
the traditional way, the labour-
intensive way. the ????
thought had disappeared: and it gives
the distillery absolute control over the
quality of its whisky from start to finish.

Several things have made this
possible. One is that the business has
remained in the hands of the same
family since per-legal days. Another is
that it doesn't keep the stills
hammering away, day and night, in
pursuit of some productivity record.
It buys as much barley as it believes
market conditions indicate, malts it
and kilns it - and only then, when
the bins are stocked with up to 200
tonnes of malted barley, does it start
distilling. So in the average year, the
stills will be operating for a total of
only four months.

This is viable because the men
who steep the barley, germinate it on
the malting floors and dry it in the
kiln, then change jobs to operate the
mash tun, the washbacks and the
stills. At the same time, Springbank's
tiny bottling plant - ???feel with
matured?? whisky from is own
warehouses - works all year round.
And something like 99 per cent of
Springbank is bottled as a single-
malt, which is also very unusual.

Director John McDougall, who
has worked in distilling for 30 years
and says he's "one of a dying breed"
(although he looks extremely
healthy), told me that computer
???manages] microchip whisky was an
alien culture to Springbank. His
whisky was made by real people. In
fact, Springbank has a permanent
workforce of 24, more than double
that of an obsessively modernised
distillery.

But brewer Hector Gatt showed
me how even on the traditional
malting floors reintroduced two
years ago, the advantages of
electricity are not
ignored. The sprouting barley is
turned by a machine resembling a
lawn-mower. But when this breaks
down, which is not impossible, the
men sigh, reach for the old wooden
shovels which stand by in readiness
against the wall, and laboriously turn
the grain in the old way, by muscle-
power.

There are changes also at the
kiln, hut nothing that you'd notice.
The peat used for drying (more for
Longrow, less to make Springbank)
is now brought in from Islay. Once
the distillery had its
own local peat-banks, operated by
two employees who would vanish up
to the moor in April to cut and stack
the aromatic fuel, and would rarely
be seen again until October.
Longrow, the more heavily-peated
of these two malts, is quite a rarity
and isn't made every year.

There's a row of three stills at
Springbank, hut this doesn't mean
that the whisky is triple-distilled. Oh no.
Nothing is that simple here. Hector
Gatt told me that in precise terms, it
was distilled "two-and-a-half times".
Because this sounds impossible, it
requires some explanation.

From any of the six larch-wood
washbacks, the liquid goes first to
the wash-still. Unusually (again) this
is heated by a live flame from
beneath, which requires a
"rummager" - a sort of copper
chain-mail mat - to circulate inside
and prevent burning. From here, the
low wines are treated again in the
two spirit stills.

But one of the great
characteristics of Springbank is its
"body" - what some tasters would
call its chewy quality. If the whisky
was too strong in alcohol it would
also he too light. So the stillman will
add a small quantity of low wines
from the first distillation to the
liquid which is to go through the
third still. How much to add is a
matter of experience and fine
judgement. You couldn't program
this into a computer.